How to find information in the Agriculture Bibliography collection

There are 4 ways to find information in this collection:

search for particular words

access publications by title

access publications by author

access publications by subject

You can search for particular words that
appear in the text from the "search" page. This is the first page that
comes up when you begin, and can be reached from other pages by pressing
the search button.

You can access publications by title by
pressing the titles a-z button. This brings up a list of books in
alphabetic order.

You can access publications by author by
pressing the authors a-z button. This brings up a list of books,
sorted by author name.

You can access publications by subject by
pressing the subjects button. This brings up a list of subjects,
represented by bookshelves.

How to read the documents

You can tell when you have arrived at an individual book or document
because its title, or a photograph of the front cover, appears at the top
left of the page. In some collections this is accompanied by a table of
contents, while others contain just the number of the current page along
with a box that allows you to select a new page and go forward and
backward. In the table of contents, the current section heading is in bold
face, and the table is expandable -- click on the folders to open or close
them; click on the open book at the top to close it.

Underneath is the text of the current section. When you have read
through it, there are arrows at the bottom to take you on to the next
section or back to the previous one.

Below the title or front-cover photograph are some buttons. Click on
expand text to expand out the whole text of the current section, or
book. If the document is large, this could take a long time and use a lot
of memory! Click on expand contents to expand out the whole table of
contents so that you can see the titles of all chapters and
subsections. Click on detach to make a new browser window for this
document. (This is useful if you want to compare documents, or read two at
once.) Finally, when you do a search the words you search for are
highlighted. Click on no highlighting to remove highlighting.

When you make a query, the titles of twenty matching documents will be shown.
There is a button at the end to take you on to the next twenty documents. From
there you will find buttons to take you on to the third twenty or back to the
first twenty, and so on. Click the title of any document, or the little button
beside it, to see it.

A maximum of 100 is imposed on the number of
documents returned. You can change this number by clicking the
preferences button at the top of the page.

Search terms

Whatever you type into the query box is interpreted as a list of words
called "search terms." Each term contains nothing but alphabetic characters
and digits. Terms are separated by white space. If any other characters such
as punctuation appear, they serve to separate terms just as though they were
spaces. And then they are ignored. You can't search for words that include
punctuation.

For example, the query

Agro-forestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability (1993)

will be treated the same as

Agro forestry in the Pacific Islands Systems for Sustainability 1993

Query type

There are two different kinds of query.

Queries for all of the words. These look for documents (or
chapters, or titles) that contain all the words you have specified.
Documents that satisfy the query are displayed, in alphabetical
order.

Queries for some of the words. Just list some terms that are
likely to appear in the documents you are looking for. Documents are
displayed in order of how closely they match the query. When determining
the degree of match,

the more search terms a document contains, the closer it matches;

rare terms are more important than common ones;

short documents match better than long ones.

Use as many search terms as you like--a whole sentence, or even a
whole paragraph. If you specify only
one term, documents will be ordered by its frequency of occurrence.

Scope of queries

In most collections you can choose different indexes to search. For example, there might
be author or title indexes. Or there might be chapter or paragraph indexes. Generally,
the full matching document is returned regardless of which index you search.

If documents are books, they will be opened at the appropriate place.

Changing your preferences

When you click the preferences button at the top of the page you will
be able to change some features of the interface to suit your own requirements.

Collection preferences

Some collections comprise several subcollections, which can be searched
independently or together, as one unit. If so, you can select which
subcollections to include in your searches on the Preferences page.

Language preferences

Each collection has a default presentation language, but you can switch to
a different language if you like. You can also alter the encoding scheme
used by Greenstone for output to the browser -- the software chooses
sensible defaults, but with some browsers better visual results can be used
by switching to a different encoding scheme. All collections allow you to
switch from the standard graphical interface format to a textual one. This
is particularly useful for visually impaired users who use large screen
fonts or speech synthesizers for output.

Presentation preferences

Depending on the particular collection, there may be several options you can
set that control the presentation.

Collections of Web pages allow you to suppress the Greenstone navigation bar at
the top of each document page, so that once you have done a search you land at
the exact Web page that matches without any Greenstone header. To do another
search you will have to use your browser's "back" button. These collections
also allow you to suppress Greenstone's warning message when you click a link
that takes you out of the digital library collection and on to the Web itself.
And in some Web collections you can control whether the links on the "Search
Results" page take you straight to the actual URL in question, rather than to
the digital library's copy of the page.

Search preferences

Two pairs of buttons control the kind of text matching in the searches that
you make. The first set (labeled "case differences") controls whether upper and
lower case must match. The second ("word endings") controls whether to ignore
word endings or not. It is possible to get a large query box, so that you can
easily do paragraph-sized searching. It is surprisingly quick to search for
large amounts of text.

For example, if the buttons ignore case differences and
ignore word endings are selected, the query

African building

will be treated the same as

africa builds

because the uppercase letter in "African" will be transformed to
lowercase, and the suffixes "n" and "ing" will be removed from
"African" and "building" respectively (also, "s" would be removed from
"builds").

You can switch to an "advanced" query mode which allows you to combine terms
using AND (&), OR (|), and NOT (!). This allows you to specify more precise
queries. You can turn the search history feature, which shows you your last few
queries. This makes it easy to repeat slightly modified versions of previous
queries. Finally, you can control the number of hits returned, and the
number presented on each screenful.